It was in 1986 – way before Foster became director of the Mayor’s Office for Special Events and Tourism – when the Olde Towne last feted a world championship team. The 1985-86 Celtics wrapped up their 16th NBA crown June 8, beating the Houston Rockets in six games. Two days later, more than 1.5 million fans clogged downtown for a parade that snaked from Copley Square to City Hall Plaza.

Larry Bird. Kevin McHale. Robert Parish. Danny Ainge. Bill Walton.

No Dennis Johnson. He was sick. No matter.

Craig Savoie, then 18, stood in awe. “Everybody was there,” said Savoie, now 32 and still a dyed-in-the-wool sports nut from Tyngsboro who worships at the altar of the Celtics, Bruins, Patriots and Red Sox. “It was a blast.”

Also in the crowd that day – right up close to his heroes – was an 11-year-old boy who would grow up to wear

the green himself.

“My dad was a state representative at the time, and we were at City Hall on the stage celebrating with the Celtics,” recalled Chris Herren, a legend at Durfee High in Fall River and now a Celtics point guard. “I just remember being part of that. It was cool.”

Those were heady days for Boston sports fans – a time when it seemed the world revolved around the Hub.

“That was ’86,” Rick Mignault of Sudbury said, his eyes brightening at the memory. “Eighty-six was a good year. Remember ’86?”

Who could ever forget?

It began in January when the Patriots capped off the greatest season in team history with an appearance in Super Bowl 20. (OK, they got splattered by the Bears, but you can’t have everything.)

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In the spring, the Canadiens again swept the Bruins out of the playoffs in the first round, but the Celtics more than picked up the slack with what Larry Bird thought was the greatest team of the Bird Era. (And he should know, right?)

Then in October the Red Sox were within a strike of winning the World Series when ... well, you know what happened there.

Still, the promise of next season was bright. Another parade, fans thought, was just around the corner.

Maybe they took it all for granted.

“I know I did,” Herren said. “Even at 11 years old, I was aware of the concept of: We’re going to keep winning (titles).”

Instead, in the 14 long years that have followed, Boston’s four major teams have won exactly nothing.

“Since then,” Savoie said, “it’s been all downhill, you know?”

—

Of the 10 other cities/metropolitan areas that have teams in each of the four major sports, only two – Phoenix and Philadelphia – are in sorrier shape than Boston when it comes to titles.

Phoenix (we include the Cardinals here even though their home stadium is in Tempe) has never won a championship, although it gets an asterisk because both the NHL’s Coyotes (who moved from Winnipeg in 1996) and baseball’s Diamondbacks (a ’98 expansion team) are relative newcomers.

Philly, with four long-established clubs, has been waiting since ’83, when the Dr. J-led 76ers swept the Lakers in the NBA finals. But don’t shed any tears for the city where they boo Santa Claus – and funerals. With the Sixers (Allen Iverson) and Eagles (Donovan McNabb) having hitched their wagons to stars, and the Flyers again in the playoff mix – and looking to cash in on an Eric Lindros deal – things are looking up.

Meanwhile here in the Hub, we sit on the periphery, too often left to ponder the likes of Vitaly Potapenko, P.J. Axelsson, Otis Smith and Pete Schourek.

Sure, there have been some teases along the way. In ’87, the Celtics lost the NBA finals to the Lakers. In January of ’97, the Patriots made it back to the Super Bowl and hung around for three quarters before losing to the Packers. The Red Sox made it all the way to the American League Championship Series in ’99 before the Yankees got in their way – again.

Foster said Boston fans were “so itchy” for a party that the mayor’s office held a pre-Super Bowl sendoff ceremony for the Pats and a party congratulating the Red Sox on simply making the playoffs.

Talk about lowering your standards.

Then again, that’s fitting, considering the depths to which three of the Big Four have sunk. Consider this motley crew:

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— Celtics – Seven straight losing seasons after finishing under .500 only seven times in the franchise’s first 47 years. Now strangled by a mismanaged salary cap.

— Bruins – Missed the playoffs two of the last four seasons after qualifying 29 times in a row beginning in 1967-68. Streak ended with humiliating dead-last finish in ’96-97.

The Red Sox, by comparison, are a smashing success. They have the two brightest stars in the Boston sports galaxy – Pedro Martinez and Nomar Garciaparra – and have made the playoffs five times since the ’86 Series.

They still haven’t won it all since 1918, however, which kind of disqualifies them from being the odds-on favorite.

Celtics coach Rick Pitino, the boos of the FleetCenter faithful still ringing in his ears one day last season, snapped, “All the negativity that’s in this town sucks.”

Sure, it does. So when will it all end? As Foster put it, the ghost of Larry Bird is getting awfully lonely on the City Hall Plaza balcony.

“Pretty pitiful,” Mignault, a 42-year-old Pats fan, said when asked to assess the state of Boston pro sports.

Vidal Ibanez agrees. The 27-year-old grew up in Chelsea but now lives in New Jersey. He follows all four Boston teams, but the Pats are his favorite, to the extent that he commutes to Foxboro for every home game.

“We’ve been going through struggles, going through 1-15 seasons, playoffs but no championships,” said Ibanez, wearing a Drew Bledsoe jersey, a foam Pats logo propped on his head. “It’s kind of rough.”

While the fans shake their heads and pine for the good old days, at least some athletes feel their pain.

“The frustration is very close to my heart,” said Herren, a lifelong Celtics fanatic who takes the ‘T’ to the FleetCenter for most home games. “I’ve been going through it just like everyone else.”

Ditto for Bruins defenseman Hal Gill, a Concord native who played quarterback for Nashoba Regional High School. “The sports fans of Boston are dying for some team to step up right now,” said Gill, a regular at the old Boston Garden growing up. “We want to be that team.”

If the Bruins did win the race back to the mountaintop, they would make Mike O’Connell a happy man – and not just because he’s the team’s general manager. O’Connell grew up in Cohasset, where he still lives, and attended Archbishop Williams High School in Braintree.

“This is my home. I was raised here,” said O’Connell, a former All-Star defenseman for the Bruins who said being part of a Cup winner here “would be unreal.”

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Howard Gerber, 28, might not be moved. The Brockton native is proud that “I bleed Celtics green, Red Sox blue, Patriots blue.” Note no Bruins black and gold, but Gerber said a title of any kind would be a shot in the arm.

“It’d be crazy,” said Gerber, who is keeping his Pats season tickets even though he’s moving to Houston. “I think it’s what the city needs to kind of rejuvenate its spirits. We’ve been so close for so long.

“I think it would stop some of those bad feelings we have to New York.”

—

Ah, New York, New York. The city so nice they named it twice – and shouted it in your face.

If there’s anything worse than Boston’s current struggles it’s that they come at a time when the Big Apple – fresh off a Subway Series and the Mike Mussina signing – is even more puffed up than usual.

“I can’t stand New York fans, only because my family is from there and I’m so tired of being teased by all my nephews,” said Alyssa Forman, 40, of Milford. “They call the Celtics ‘Green Slime.’ ”

Jose Masso, the senior associate director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society, said sports “unites us as very few things do.” Right now, Masso said, we’re united in wondering what the heck is going on.

“We’re looking at ourselves in the mirror,” he said.

Do we like what we see?

Charles Fountain, a journalism professor at Northeastern and a former TV sportscaster in Worcester in the ’70s, says yes. In 1993, Fountain published a book on the life of famed sportswriter Grantland Rice, the man who coined the phrase that it didn’t matter whether you won or lost “but how you played the game.”

Fountain acknowledged that Rice’s sunny outlook may have clouded his own judgment, but he insists, “A Bostonian’s sense of his city is secure enough for him to withstand mediocre teams and hard times in professional sports maybe better than some other cities.”

Still, Fountain admits unless someone starts winning soon, there’s a “fear that Boston is going to become Louisville or Columbus or some other Triple-A city.”

That’s not what Cecily Foster wants to hear.

She keeps herself busy enough, planning shows on the City Hall Plaza. During the summer there’s a concert series. Right now you can visit the Enchanted Village, which is billed as a “magical, animated recreation of a turn-of-the-century New England village.”

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Cute.

Foster, however, still clings to the hope that one day she will have to plan an intimate gathering for a few million friends.

“We could drive the Public Works Commissioner crazy with a big ticker-tape parade,” she said with a laugh, “because then he’d have to clean it up.

“The law of averages is that we’re due.”

Amen to that, Ibanez said. If there’s a parade, he’s driving up from Jersey. “I’ll tell you,” he said defiantly, “I’d take six days off of work if I have to.”

There’s just one small catch.

Somebody’s got to win first.

“I’ll come through if they give it to me,” Foster said of the B’s, C’s, Pats and Sox, “but they’ve got to do their part first.”